June 14 (Bloomberg) -- AT&T Inc. apologized to Apple Inc. iPad 3G tablet computer users whose e-mail addresses were exposed during a security breach disclosed last week.
“No other information was exposed,” Dorothy Attwood, AT&T’s chief privacy officer, said in an e-mail sent yesterday to iPad accounts that may have been affected. “We apologize for the incident and any inconvenience it may have caused”.
As many as 114,000 e-mail addresses were uncovered through a program on AT&T’s website by Goatse Security, Escher Auernheimer, an analyst with the nine-person group, said on June 11, after the leak was made public earlier in the week.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation has begun an inquiry, Lindsay Godwin, a bureau spokeswoman, said in a June 11 interview, declining to give more specifics. Goatse said it obtained access to the e-mail addresses of New York Times Chief Executive Officer Janet Robinson and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, among others.
“The hackers deliberately went to great efforts with a random program to extract” the information, Attwood said in the e-mail. “They then put together a list of these emails and distributed it for their own publicity”.
Goatse, which helps Web firms close security gaps, said in a blog posting today that it uncovered the iPad flaw in about an hour and publicized it in the interest of user safety.
“The potential for this sort of attack and the number of iPad users on the list we saw who were stewards of major public and commercial infrastructure necessitated our public disclosure,” Auernheimer said in the blog post.
